Posted
by
Soulskillon Wednesday January 20, 2010 @02:22PM
from the cause-or-symptom dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"

The specific members of Rare that designed goldeneye and perfect dark became free radical and made timesplitters/timesplitters 2/3 (spiritual successors to GE and PD), Second Sight, finally having a big flop with Haze on the ps3 then went bankrupt and got bought out by crytek and became "crytek uk". They're now sitting on timesplitters 4 while they work on some project that has £50 million injected into it by crytek. The rest of Rare got bought up, chewed up, and shat out by microsoft. The two founder

I'm dead serious, I tried to enjoy it. I played it when I was like 12 or 13, and I played it hard and long. I tried really, really hard to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do. And from a really masochistic point of view it was interesting to figure out what the various symbols meant that could pop up on the top of the screen when you walked around. Oh, when I crane my neck here one of the pits light up. Ok, let's drop down into it. Hey l

I actually really liked Tron 2.0. It had its issues, like the fact that you broke your neck if you fell more than 7 feet, an odd weapon balance, and some annoying Super Mario Bros. jumping sequences. However, the aesthetics were gorgeous, the gameplay was fun, and the character customization was interesting.

Beyond the environment, I'm sure many folks would argue it wasn't a spectacular game, but it didn't suck.:)

Actually Star Trek A Final Unity was awesome, also add to that the really amazing new Batman Darkham Asylum, and add to the list the Original Hitchhikers guide game as well as the Blade Runner game done I think by either Interplay or Westwood.I also thought the first Dune game was quite good (although I am pretty alone in this) and Dune 2 is mostly a classic because it single handedly redefined the genre of RTS by laying out all concepts which still exist nowadays within one game.There are probably others f

It's a given that games-after-movies will have a higher chance of sucking.

1) IP price. The rights to the game cost a fortune. And while you can surely cut cost on the advertisment side, the rights usually cost more than you save on ads. That money is missing in the development process.

2) Time constraints. Face it, the game has to hit the street NOW. Not in a year. Not in half a year, even. NOW. Nobody cares about a game to a movie that ran 6 months ago. The movie is now, so the game has to be now. Else you

The video game itself was tedious, but the that mini game off the main menu where you could hack the terminal was awesome good fun. Without checking YouTube first, I say aloud to no-one that a cut together edit of all of the cinemas would be nice to watch through. Now I just need to care enough this much later to bother looking.

Enter The Matrix was somewhat unique. Unlike a typical game based on a movie, where you're basically playing the main character from the movie doing the same things in the same places, ETM was actually a precursor to The Matrix Reloaded and involved different characters and locations to set the scene for the movie. How cool was that? And how many other games have done this?!

I consider Enter the Matrix to have been a surprisingly good movie tie in; in fact, I'd consider the game to be the true spiritual successor to the first Matrix film. Missions like the post office and the airport missions has the feel of what you sort of expected was the kind of thing the rebels actually got up to in the Matrix. The game only fell down mission wise when it stuck too close to the film it was bound into supporting.

If I was a bazillonaire, considering all the evolution that had that game, would buy the rights, and keep the development in the same crazy way it was till now. The Singularity should not be so far away in that road.

If I was a bazillionaire I would be too busy with my harem and skiing on huge piles of cash to care. And if I wanted to piss off the gaming community, I would just give Uwe Boll an unlimited credit line and tell him to go nuts.

Every universe has its black holes. The gaming universe is no exception. In fact, there is one called DNF. Stay away, lest your company be sucked in and doomed never to return! Yes I know it's a beautiful site, but you *must* stay away from DNF.

ET would have never killed off gaming - all it would have done is tighten the standards on what publishers would ship as acceptable (which actually happened) and people would tighten their standards on what they would buy before trying. ET if anything was probably good for the industry and consumers. Right now I think we are seeing a return of shovelware, and its effects. The economy is bad, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one waiting for COD MW2 to end up in the bargain bin (60$ is just too much to take a chance on).

Same with MMO's - I'm sure somewhere Mythic for instance has a figure on how many box sales they will get on day one, and aren't nearly as concerned with how many people actually stay subscribed (just my observation - they just seem disinterested in actually addressing community concerns).

And yes I bought ET when it came out - its still in my box o carts wherever my 2600 is, and it wasn't the last pile of crap I ever spent good money on, but it certianly made me think more about my purchases after that.

Actually, as someone who was an avid gamer at the time (I had a VIC20 plus a Coleco with the Atari adapter so I could play most games) I would say what caused the "big crash" of 83/84 was a combination of "games" like chase the chuckwagon [wikipedia.org] and "The A-Team" (Lord that one was bad) combined with retailers going "balls in" and investing WAAAY too much money and floor space to games.

I remember when the crash happened I went to the local Magic Mart (anybody remember that chain?) and I was snatching up Atari games

I belive Maxis was infact saved from near bankruptcy by EA just before Simcity 3000. Infact I believe the EA acquisition is probably what enabled to push Dollhouse (The Sims) from idea to a full game. Will Wright mentioned the idea of The sims in a old interview done shortly after Simcity 2000, but it's possible staff in Maxis either didn't believe in the idea or didn't have the funds for it.

Simcity 3000 development wasn't really going anywhere apparently. They were originally planning to make the game full

Troika was always an overly ambitious company. Their writing and setting development was top notch, but all their releases demonstrated an apparent lack of management oversight and nitty-gritty game programming/scripting expertise. Bloodlines is a great example: the first two and a half areas are brilliant, with rich characters and excellent writing and comparatively few bugs. It was among the best FPSRPGs I'd ever played.

Then the rest of the game is increasingly a trainwreck, until the last level is just a silly run and gun through a repetitive skyscraper, which was so regressive in terms of design that it smacked of FPS games pre-Half-Life. Tons of stuff was obviously cut from the game, and it seems quite likely they had to rush it out the door to make deadline, with stuff unfinished.

Arcanum had many of the same flaws as Bloodlines - stronger early game than endgame, cut or abandoned gameplay elements, bugs and a lack of fine-tuning - but on nowhere near the same scale.

If they had used leaked code, Valve's legal department certainly would have killed their company. They licensed the Source engine, it's just that when HL2 was first released, it was buggy, and only Valve had the knowledge to get it working properly, rather than a 3rd party developer.

Wasn't it inferior, because the entire concept of parsed-natural language commands was boggy and inferior to a GUI for almost all users? There was no way Cornerstone could have been made a serious competitor, but I guess someone had to try. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but assuming even base-line literacy in your customers is a dangerous step...

TFA mentions Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness as the game that tipped Eidos/Core over.

I first discovered the series with Tomb Raider 2. Since then, huge fan! I bought all the games for PS1, and a few for the Mac as well (I'd re-play the game on my in-laws' computer sometimes.)

When Eidos announced Angel of Darkness for PS2, I was obviously caught up in the hype. More memory and higher res meant more intricate puzzles and larger levels - this would be an amazing game. Or so I thought. Aside from buggy gameplay (and there was a lot of that) they changed the game mechanic to the point that it was like playing an entirely different game, but with Lara Croft in it. No tombs, no puzzles, just a lot of running around shooting things.

I quit the game before I got very far in it, the same sucked that bad. I recall making it just past the cemetary - which I understand is still pretty early in the game.

Still, good things came out of this fiasco: Tomb Raider: Legend was actually very good! Amazing what a new developer can do to breathe fresh life into a project. (That said, Uncharted is a better series.)

Actually it is not just Tomb Raider Legend, every Tomb Raider so far, done by Crystal Dynamics is very good and among the best in the series, too bad that the series itself has been drained to death, so CD does not get the rewards they should for reviving the series in this excellent manner.

I bought it when it first came out. I played it for maybe two days before giving up on it. The game play was so radically different from MOO2 that I just couldn't figure out how to make it work the way I wanted. I guess it was closer to MOO than MOO2, but I was really hoping for a more refined version of the sequel not the original.

Things I would have liked as improvements of MOO2:Better AI for space battles, both on the enemies part and when you told it to fight for you.Better build que management, longer

To make the assumption a "bad" game sank a company is hard to justify, considering "bad" games often sell much better than "good" ones.

There are a lot of companies that make bad products that are profitable (mine, for example) and many that make great products that can't stay in business.

In many cases, I would bet that a game company runs the risk of going out of business because their product is too good (or bent on being too good, and never hits the shelves in time to start making profit).

I saw MYST available as an iPod app. I didn't feel like dishing out $5.99 for it so I can't tell you if it's any good. However it's a sign that somebody somewhere is still getting picking up some loose change from it.

The "remastered" original Monkey Island game is also available on Steam and iPod. It has received high marks on both.

Surprised they didn't mention Vanguard. It killed Sigil software and the only reason it's still on Life Support is SOE bought it out on the cheap. (See also: Matrix Online before that one was finally killed)

I tried out Tabula Rasa a few months before it was shut down, at a point when most of its serious problems were sorted out. But poor game mechanics was its biggest weakness.

What annoyed me most was how it was touted as a FPS/RPG hybrid. IMO for anything to be deemed an FPS, it must rely on players to aim their weapons and the game would utilize collision detect to ascertain hits. Tabula Rasa did not do this - you had to select what enemies to shoot at, and it was all chance based like most MMOs out there. T

I tried it and liked it, a lot. The wife enjoyed it, too. The problem we had was this is where it ended. There wasn't any sense of community and we couldn't get anyone interested in it. As a single player game, it kind of fell short.

It just wasn't good enough to get them to where they could release Mythos which would have been the cash cow. Like many small businesses their essential failing was being under-capitalized, not necessarily a terrible product.

Duke Nukem Forever didn't kill the studio; the studio killed themselves off without the need of any additional assistance.

The other examples are cases of products being buggy, or misguided, or overzealous... but any project is doomed to fail when the project team doesn't have a goal, and doesn't really work on the project.

Either I misread you, or you're missing the point. The death of the studio was the desire to make DNF both internally perfect and better than anything else on the market. They wound up chasing from one engine to the next and bled themselves dry.

If you either take Duke out of the picture entirely, or release it as a mediocre game then the dev shop may well still be alive today.

From what I've read, the whole reason it was called Final Fantasy in the first place was that the company was planning to close and Final Fantasy was their swan song. They weren't expecting a miracle since they were treading in new waters and just decided to publish their last game. And lo and behold, their final game that was supposed to be the end of the company turned out to be their saving throw.

What actually killed Origin was EA. EA purchased Origin in the same year that Ultima 7 was released--and coincidentally, Ultima 7 was the last really good Ultima game. Ultima 7 part 2 was fun and a good story, but it was far too linear. It also never felt like an Ultima. Ultima 8 was rushed to keep EA's stockholders happy. Ultima 9 was simply a travesty. The constant delays, rewrites, and fighting between Garriot and EA turned what could have been a fantastic ending to the series into a pile of poo.

Actually you cannot blame everything regarding U9 on EA (and also not everything from U8). The jumping which made the initial U8 so lousy was simply that Garriot wanted to have more jump and run elements in there and the missing content was ort of additional packs (since they worked out so well for U7). Problem simply was the everyone hated the jumping, Origin fixed that in the first patch. The missing content never appeared because EA axed further works on the game due to the financial dive it caused. As f

This doesn't take a huge heap of imagination, but I'm going to go ahead and predict that the unexpected, unprecedented success of WoW will be the end of Blizzard. This seems like a really safe bet based on any of the following scenarios:

1) Activision big-brothers them into oblivion2) They get caught up making bad movies, rather than good games3) They are never able to make a successful sequel, or even another really profitable title4) Creative differences, anti-user angst, or other mis-management runs it into the ground (e.g. NGE) and the shop never recovers

There's just too many dollars riding on WoW. Too much momentum. Surviving the end of that is going to either require masterful leadership or gigantic catastrophe.

Come to think of it, didn't they name their next expansion 'Cataclysm'?;)

To date, as far as I can tell, Blizzard has never made a bad (debatable, based on personal taste) or unsuccessful (not up for debate) game. They've got a perfect record. And they're raking in more money every month. If that's a recipe for disaster, sign me up!

Except Origin Systems was a player in a comparatively tiny niche industry. Blizzard has made money hand over fist in an industry that rivals or surpasses other popular entertainments like music and movies, and managed to expand a particular genre to an entirely new demographic.

Comparing UO and Origin Systems to WoW and Blizzard is comparing apples and oranges... or comparing Daimler Motor Company in the 1900s to Toyota and Honda in the modern world.

Starcraft Ghost actually is evidence for Tobor's post, you do realise? Blizzard saw that Ghost wasn't going to be up to scratch and canned it, thus preserving their perfect track record. Cancelled games can hardly affect this, otherwise we'd be talking about Warcraft Adventures well before any mention of Ghost.

Also they will be operating WoW at a profit for the next 10 years if they did nothing else with it other than supply power. Its hard to be a convincing doomsayer when they have 10,000,000+ subscribers without giving a compelling reason to believe that they would fail. You're not liking that fact does not make it less true.

Apart from WoW, they've not actually released a game in what, a decade? More?

Warcraft III released in July 2002. Before that was Diablo II in 2000, and Starcraft in 1998. So up to WoW (which released in 2004), they were pretty consistently hitting a game every two years. Since WoW, it's been five.

Seriously, Company started with one of the best RTS ever, Total Annihilation, then followed up with a two expansions, one that added a slew of multiplayer maps and units, and another which added tons of single player maps. Seemed they were destined for greatness.

Then came TA: Kingdoms. Wow, what a disaster. It was medieval in looks, but played just like any tank based rts. It felt almost like a palette swap, rather then a new game. When it bombed, all other titles got scrapped, even Amen: The Awakening, which sounded phenomenal, so they could rush off and make TA2, which was still years away.

It should be noted the death of GT Interactive also had it's hand in the death of Cavedog. But had TA: Kingdoms been a better game, they may have had the money to break away and fund the rest of their games.

I still dream about someone picking up Amen's license and remaking the game. The premise and characters sounded fun.

I worked at Atari as a lead tester for the Nintendo titles when they put me on the Driv3r PC title for a few days. I bugged ~200 falling out of the world incidents that were never classified as fixed when the game was released.

IIRC, either Driv3r PC or another racing title, the developers guessed the bug database password, went in to marked all the bugs fixed, and tried to pushed for code release to save their delivery bonus. The QA team had to re-verify the status of all 4,000 bugs before a code release meeting could be scheduled. The developers and the producer lost their bonuses.

The good old days at Atari. My first novel that I'm now revising is based on my misadventures at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crises). You have never worked in a screwed up company until you spend six years at a video game company.

Looking Glass Studios went out of business even though they've produced over half a dozen of the best games of all time. Terra Nova, Thief 1 and 2, System Shock 1 and 2, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Car and Driver, Flight Unlimited. Actually, if you find a list of their games you'll see that they didn't really had any failures.

Black Isle were producing great games and still broke down, although Interplay may not have helped that situation. Troika then died and Obsidian have only really done NWN2, unless you actually want to count unfinished but still released games in KOTOR2.

People always bitch about good games being ignored nowadays as if it's some sort of new occurrence, and how crap games kill companies if they hit hard enough. But great companies can still die purely because you can create games that are simply too awesome for mainstream gaming to handle.

Wrong, DX was created by the Ion Storm Austin team lead by Warren Spector.

Although if anything, and without being an expert, it's probably all the focus on IS Dallas that allowed them to create such a polished gem. People moan about graphics and stuff, but Deus Ex wouldn't be Deus Ex if they had made better graphics and left out the story, sidequests and massive levels. They had a deadline and focused on the good bits.